Posts have been a little thin on the ground this week, mainly because a bunch of us contributors were sidetracked by working on a project to put up as much useful information as we could about the new Supreme Court appointment. Originally an idea of Simon Chester’s, a number of us signed on to go like crazy at the last minute to use our research skills and show everyone how it’s done.

Well. First of all the short list got leaked, and so we had rather more time than we’d expected — and rather more targets. Like most everyone else, . . . [more]

The Prime Minister’s Office announced this morning that the Honourable Mr. Justice Marshall E. Rothstein, currently a member of the Federal Court of Appeal, is the candidate to be interviewed as nominee for new member of the Supreme Court of Canada.

News Release – PMO – February 23, 2006

For an excellent (and I do mean excellent) summary of Justice Rothstein’s career to date, see this page on the Office of the Commissioner of Judicial Affairs website:

Justice Rothstein

It includes curriculum vitae, extensive lists and links to his many written decisions, examples of his written decisions at the . . . [more]

Lawyers are knowledge workers. I fundamentally disagree, for semantic reasons, with the proposition that "lawyers are not knowledge workers". I do not take issue with the laudable characteristics that should be associated with "lawyers as knowledge workers".

Maybe I’m slow, but it seems to me that the Open Access movement and IP Law bloggers have remained mostly unconnected in public fora. IP lawyers tend to blog on a range of substantive IP issues, and OA proponents, where they discuss the law, tend to focus on copyright. But today Peter Suber of Open Access points to this article by James Boyle, an IP professor and OA proponent, in the Financial Times which seems to bridge some of the gap. These two older articles are also worth reading: one, two. The latter outlines how, in the WIPO . . . [more]

I fully concur with Neil Campbell in lauding LLMC – no praise is too much. I’d also like to support his comments about the preservation of the legal heritage – something I was also talking with Balfour Halevy about this afternoon. We at Osgoode are currently developing plans for a major expansion of our ‘knowledge management’ capability over the next year or two, investing heavily in state of the art software that will enable us to take on some really large scale digitization projects. I’ve mentioned before projects that I have in mind like a collection of Confederation-related documentation, but . . . [more]

I’ve just finished reading the lastest Law Library Microform Consortium Newsletter (#17, February 2006), in which I found out that LLMC itself is 30 years old, and the digital project is now 3 years old this February.

I’ve sung the praises of LLMC before on SLAW but again I ugre SLAWers to take a look at what they are up to, particularly the digitizing of Canadian titles at http://www.llmc.com.

I particulary note their work with the Legal Information Preservation Alliance (LIPA) to develop an online, universally-accessible database for the tracking of hardcopy preservation copies of legal and law-related print . . . [more]

I don’t know if Slawyers ever heard the wonderful comedy sketch by the ’60’s English group Beyond the Fringe (Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Alan Bennett and Jonathan Miller) in which a coal miner bemoans his fate, and opines: “Yes, I could have been a Judge but I never had the Latin. I never had the Latin for the judgin’.”

Seems that some parliamentarians are going to get to see whether Prime Minister Harper’s nominee for the Supreme Court has the Latin, all in front of TV cameras so we can judge the coal miners for ourselves. ” ‘These are public . . . [more]

1. Yahoo! Publisher’s Guide to RSS
2. RSS Specification
3. RSS Specification: “5 Reasons Why Your Site Needs to Publish a News Feed”
4. RSS Specification: “What is RSS – for Marketers”
5. RSS Specification: “Steps to Create & Promote RSS Feeds”
6. RSS Specification: RSS Articles
7. Canada Law Book
8. CCH Canadian Ltd
9. Federal Publications
10. Federal Publications: “What’s New”
11. Federated Press
12. Carswell: areas of interest: business
13. Carswell: areas of interest: international
14. UTF-8
15. Webmonkey
16. Cardiff Index to Legal Abbreviations
17. First Monday February 2006
18. Law Librarian Blog
19. Alberta Historical Law Collection
20. Alberta Historical Digitization Project
21. The British Columbia Reports
22. LLMC Digital
23. Vancouver Island flag
24. Saltspring Island flag
25. moiré

. . . [more]

In my last post I bemoan our publishers not yet using RSS. To make this criticism a wee bit more constructive, here are a few guides to the use of RSS for syndication of new titles for our beloved book providers.

Yahoo! Publisher’s Guide to RSS – send your feeds to Yahoo! and widen your client base.

Great articles from RSS Specification:

“5 Reasons Why Your Site Needs to Publish a News Feed”
Reason #1: More free traffic to your site
Reason #2: It’s a hands-off way to update your audience
Reason #3: Get visitors to click through to . . . [more]

Wouldn’t it be great to be able to take all the latest book release and other publication notices from all the publishers, and have them automatically feed onto a web page for you? Or into your email, as one discrete message rather than several? Then you wouldn’t have to hunt around websites quite so much, and the publisher reps wouldn’t have to belittle us for not having read their latest bulletin because, well, it was one of only twenty you received in the past week and you can’t quite keep track. Not to mention the mounds of paper created by . . . [more]

A day or so ago, Elizabeth Ellis remarked that someone might help her write accented letters in her posts, so she could use French. It’s fairly easy to tell Elizabeth — and you — how to do that, and to put all sort of other lovely characters into your posts as well. It’s a good deal harder to explain the why’s and wherefore’s of UTF-8 encoding, so, because this is a fillip, I’m not going to try. The curious among you — yes, I’m looking at you — can work at this explanation.

How do you do it? You . . . [more]

Under the heading “Things that you think people know about, but on second thought, maybe they don’t.”

Mood. / Moo. P.C. / Swab. / Dy. / Fonbl. These are all abbreviations that cause law students to give me a blank look. If your copy of Raistrick’s is not nearby; a very handy tool to quickly find out what these abbreviations stand for is the Cardiff Index to Legal Abbreviations. A quick search reveals what an abbreviation stands for, an alternative abbreviation and the jurisdiction in question. In many cases you can also see how many different titles use the . . . [more]